


Whom My Soul Loves

by iberiandoctor (jehane)



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Barricades, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Fate, Gloves, Identity Issues, Javert Lives, M/M, Montreuil Era, Paris Era, Pining, Post Barricades, Post-Seine, Referenced canonical character death, Some Amis Live, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmate-Identifying Marks in an illiterate society, Soulmates, Unrequited love that becomes requited, Éponine Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-22
Updated: 2018-07-22
Packaged: 2019-06-04 17:54:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15152525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jehane/pseuds/iberiandoctor
Summary: In the city and in the squares, I will seek him whom my soul loves.Soul-marks AU.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [halfeatenmoon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/halfeatenmoon/gifts).



> So many beta thanks to Groucha, Prinzenhasserin and Kainosite <3
> 
> CW for some very oblique bagne dubcon, Madeleine-era identity porn, and passing references to canonical Amis character death.

To Jean Valjean, the wisdom of the Church was this: Man was not originally meant to be alone. For this reason God had created for each man a companion, one whom his soul would cleave to as its other half — as Eve was made for Adam; as Jonathan for David; as Ruth for Naomi — and the sign of this would be written in a letter on each man’s left palm.

There was a further sign — when a man first laid hands on his mate, God would send the telltale quickening of His own pulse, as a promise of what would come. And when the soul-marks were finally joined skin against skin, the skies would part and rain down their treasure and the two would become one, in a bond that Heaven and Earth could not tear asunder.

In Faverolles, as it was in the small towns and hamlets across the land, the priests had always been the ones to read the soul-marks. They would bring likely young couples together, to discover if their marks might match and quicken, and then preside over the marriages that would follow. Until that time, respectable young men and women were to keep their hands covered — so they would not incite others to touch, and discover, and in that way to fall into sin with those whom their soul did not love. 

There were rumours, of course, that the priests did not tell the whole truth. Not every citizen could read; not every man could find a matching mark in his village nor the neighbouring ones. And then there were the stories of those with soul-mates who did not reciprocate their bond, and of degenerates who rejected God and God-given companionship — whose palms grew empty because their soul-marks had fled from their skin.

Jean’s was a God-fearing family. His sister’s husband-to-be paid court to her in the traditional way: touching her only to establish the quickening, through practical gloves and under the watchful eye of the priests, and only joining their bare fingers and their marks on their wedding day. 

In his turn, Jean covered his own mark — a single initial, which had grown slowly upon his palm like the hair on his chest and between his legs — and tried to pay it no heed; for surely God would let him know when the time was ripe for him to touch and be touched, to love and be loved. 

Unfortunately for Jean, a cruel fate interrupted this expected journey from marks to courtship and eventual soul-wedded happiness. Jeanne’s mate died, and there was no work to be had, or money for food, let alone to replace Jean’s threadbare woollen gloves. And when Jeanne’s son took ill, and Jean did what no God-fearing man would do, he found himself cast aside by society and by the Church, and beyond all hopes of companionship.

For his crimes, he was imprisoned in the fearsome bagne of Toulon, where the prisoners were branded with man-made marks, their bodies stripped, and their soul-marks laid bare for all to see. 

Jean did not weep when his rough clothes were torn from his body and the brand seared impersonally into his shoulder: the letter “T”, designating _travaux forcés_ , or hard labour. His eyes only grew wet when the ragged wool was pulled from his hands and cast into the bonfire. 

“What a clear-drawn mark,” his chain-mate teased, later that night, in the stinking salle where the prisoners were to sleep side by side on freezing pallets. A strapping old-timer named Cochepaille, he gripped Jean’s left hand in both his calloused ones, touching the bared skin with a familiarity that Jean had never known before. “Looks like you’re still dreaming after some country lass called Juliette. Or perhaps she’s named Joséphine, after our Empress!”

“It could be a man’s name,” remarked Brevet, from Jean’s other side. He slid an inviting hand under Jean’s smock. 

Wearily, Jean suffered the touch against his bare flesh. There were no open heavens, no joyful connection; there was nothing other than a gaping emptiness in his soul, and a mark on his palm that, thanks to the brand on his shoulder, God would now never acknowledge.

In this way, Jean endured nineteen loveless years in Toulon, where the prisoners might be chained to each other like slaves, and sleep touching each other like animals, but would still each be achingly alone. He was not spared the indignity of nakedness before the gloved, hard-eyed guards; he was defenceless before their judgment — from the oldest and most dissolute of their number, to the youngest and most upright and least cruel, whose green eyes seemed, in this God-forsaken place, to remind him of his home.

Over the years, the soul-mark on his palm grew indistinct, and then disappeared, as if he had become one of those infamous degenerates who had turned his back on God. 

When he first noticed that his mark was fleeing him, he tried, hopelessly, to escape. He would try three more times before his eventual release. 

On the last occasion, that young guard came for him — no longer so young, and having somehow lost that lack of cruelty over the years in this hellish place. 

“You should not run,” that young guard told him, brusquely. His gloved hands burned on Jean’s forearm, like the shaming heat of his harsh, disapproving gaze. The air shivered around them, like a mockery of the God-given quickening that Jean would never experience. “They will always follow, and always find you,” and Jean felt that he had been stripped of that part of himself that could still feel hope.

Jean made no further attempts at escape, but when he was finally released, his palm was completely clouded, and his soul was filled with rage.

In the world beyond, Jean Valjean discovered that his body might be free, but the doors of companionship and civilisation and the Church itself remained closed to him, an ex-convict. In desperation, he surrendered himself to sin once more, and stretched out his shamelessly bare hand to steal. 

This time, his sin was met with love. 

“My poor child,” said the Bishop of Digne. “Love has found you again, and has purchased your soul for God.”

The Bishop drew off his holy gloves and took Valjean’s left palm in his uncovered hands. That blessed touch was like fresh water in a desert.

In the dim morning, the men watched as Valjean’s mark surfaced once more, the strokes as clear as they had been all those years ago when Valjean had first come of age. 

“It seems your soul belongs to God, and also to one other,” the Bishop said, with equanimity, and placed his own gloves on Valjean’s hands, covering him once again with dignity. 

  
  


* * *

  
  


In the gutter of Paris, no one had time for gloves, or propriety. Those whom God and the state had rejected, themselves rejected all those grand institutions; preoccupied with survival, they skirted the edges of the Law, refusing their soul-marks — which many of them could not read, in any case — and taking their comfort with whomever they could. 

Javert was determined to hold himself to a different standard. He would serve Authority and this great civilisation for as long as he drew breath. He taught himself, painstakingly, to read. When he came of age and he discovered a letter he could read on his palm, he ran errands for the officers until he could afford to cover his hands with cheap cotton — although he knew one such as he could never aspire to a soul-mate, or to something as self-indulgent as companionship. 

As a trainee and then guard in Toulon, he was given a uniform and leather gloves which he kept impeccably clean. These trappings of Authority helped him maintain the proper distance from the prisoners, whose marks, as with their sins, were laid bare for all eyes to bear witness. When he had to handle the prisoners, the leather protected him from their uncovered flesh, and from any temptation; in that way, he kept himself rigorously chaste. 

If his eye was drawn to any prisoner — there was one in particular, a brute nicknamed Jean-le-Cric, who had tried to escape from the bagne once before Javert’s posting and who would try time and again, whose massive, dirty left hand bore a clouded, unreadable mark — Javert knew he could not allow himself to experience any connection, or anything that was not society’s righteous contempt. 

His irreproachable conduct eventually drew the notice of his superiors, and he received his first position as Inspector in the town of Montreuil-sur-Mer. There, he donned a respectable hat; he fastened his stock to absolute correctness, and wore his gloves as fastidiously as any gentleman. 

Of course, he did not pretend to be a gentleman. He spent his wages on modest lodgings and on improving literature, not on the pursuits of the bourgeois. He continued in his strict celibacy: his only vice a pinch of snuff; his only intercourse the official one which he was obliged to conduct with the man who had become Montreuil’s mayor. 

Unlike Javert, Madeleine, was a gentleman. His broad body was always modestly clothed and his cravat demurely knotted; his yellow gloves were pristine. He was well-loved by the populace — he ran a factory that provided work for the town, he endowed hospitals and schools; he took upon himself no airs, but was so humble and so useful as to be respected by all.

Despite this universal acclaim, Javert harboured suspicions that there was more to Madeleine than met the eye. Surely no true gentleman would boast of such brawny labourer’s muscles that fine clothes could not conceal, muscles that somehow put him in mind of the convict Jean-le-Cric? Surely it was improper for a town’s magistrate to indulge mendicants and the lower classes and keep them in his employ? And certainly an unmarried man of Madeleine’s respectable status would seek to pay court to the eligible ladies of the town, whose first or last names might commence with the initial inscribed upon his palm — but instead he seemed to reject all societal invitations with an air of ineffable sadness, and appeared to prefer his simple and solitary life.

What was Madeleine hiding? Javert knew he ought not suspect those whom society had placed above him, but nevertheless some instinct drew him to watch over the gentleman, to try to uncover his secret.

One winter’s morning, he thought he had discovered it. 

An accident had taken place in the cavée Saint-Firmin, the steep road at the entrance to Montreuil’s upper city. Father Fauchelevent had become trapped beneath his cart; the horse had two broken legs and could not rise. The cart was sinking in the wet, muddy ground and would crush the citizen in minutes. A jack-screw had been sent for, but was too far away to assist. No one dared risk their lives to help, not even Javert, that irreproachable servant of the state. 

It had fallen to Madeleine — who stripped off his fine coat and hat, who threw himself under the cart and held it, powerful arms and loins straining, gloves and fine trousers covered in filth, until Fauchelevent was delivered. 

Madeleine remained, panting, on his knees in the muck. Javert reached down to help the rescuer to his feet. Hanging his head wearily, Madeleine took the proffered grasp, and their hands were brought together.

Even though their fingers were covered, neither could mistake the spark that passed between them: as if a hundred birds were beating their wings in the sky around them, surrounding them with a pounding vibration.

Could this be the quickening that he had heard spoken of in society? True enough, Javert had never aspired to a soul-mate, but — as he understood the doctrine — it was not unheard of that a man’s soul could be joined not to that of a woman, but of another man.

The pulse was over as quickly as it had begun. According to doctrine, it would return once the marks were uncovered and pressed skin to skin. 

Quickly, Javert assisted Madeleine to his feet and then released him. They stood there, wordlessly, panting, unable for long moments to catch their breath. 

Madeleine did not demur when Javert insisted on escorting him home. Once there, he disappeared inside his house, and Javert could be forgiven for wondering if he had imagined the entire episode. Standing on the mayor’s doorstep, Javert discovered his heart was beating as quickly as if the pulse was still vibrating through his body, and that his body had become unaccountably, shamefully aroused.

That evening, for the first time in his life, Javert had occasion to draw off his left glove, to stare at the letter that had been inscribed on his palm, and to wonder about the mayor’s first name. 

His flesh had not relented in its flushed and rigid state, the years of hard-won propriety overcome in one single, unprecedented day. It seemed it would not be quelled. He found himself taking himself in that left hand and stroking himself to completion, all the while imagining another hand clasped about his rigid erection, a hand that might have a _J_ written on its palm. 

As previously observed, Javert had never aspired to a soul-mate; he had not once considered engaging in the traditional means of courtship. But perhaps the duties he carried out in the town, working side by side with Mayor Madeleine, might stand as a worthy substitute. 

The mayor had been relentless in his efforts on Montreuil’s behalf. Not content with having provided for education and medical care, he sought to improve the town’s infrastructure and sanitation and to enhance safety on the roads. Javert had always appreciated the man’s diligence; now, where once he had disapproved of the mayor’s employing former criminals and indulging vagrants looking for hand-outs, he found himself reluctantly acknowledging the effectiveness of Madeleine’s methods. 

“I see Renty has not yet re-offended,” he would find himself reluctantly remarking to the mayor, as together they observed that former vagabond conveying one of the mayor’s laden wagons across the town square.

Madeleine smiled his faint, wry smile. “He is coming along well,” he agreed. These days, the mayor seemed to have grown more comfortable in his presence, particularly during their periodic walks around town together. He now looked meaningfully at Javert. “Perhaps now you will be convinced, Inspector, that even the most recalcitrant soul can be redeemed for God.” 

“Just because others are easily hoodwinked does not mean that I will be,” Javert muttered, keeping his cudgel at the ready, but in truth, he was edging closer towards the belief that Madeleine might not be the one mistaken.

Indeed, as winter gave way to summer and then returned once more, Javert had to acknowledge that, working side by side as efficiently if they were fated to so do, he and the mayor had indeed together built something quite satisfactory: a Montreuil that had prospered, where justice and mercy walked hand in hand, whose people had hope in a better future.

It was sheer foolishness, but Javert found he had almost started to hope, too.

“This year I must ask him,” Javert resolved to himself on the eve of Saint-Sylvestre. Picturing the mayor’s palm against his flesh had grown to become an embarrassing habit; it was time to take decisive action. “This year I will find it out.”

Alas for the good inspector — that resolution did indeed come to pass, but not in the way he would have desired. Two nights after Saint-Sylvestre, Javert had cause to arrest a woman causing an affray in front of the officer’s café: a prostitute who bared her breast in winter, upon whose clouded palm a fading _F_ could still be discerned. She had the usual ridiculous excuse about a sick child. That soft-hearted dupe, Madeleine, demanded her freedom; they both quarrelled bitterly, and Madeleine’s authority prevailed. His pride stung, Javert resumed the investigations he had originally abandoned: into the whereabouts of Jean Valjean.

He did not expect his moment of hurt vanity to so successfully uncover the mayor’s secrets. His renewed investigations revealed that Jean Valjean was being tried for new crimes in Arras. Javert took himself to that district’s assizes to testify, and so he was present when Madeleine presented his own testimony at Court.

What Madeleine said was this: the state had an innocent man in custody. Jean Valjean was none other than Mayor Madeleine, and he had hidden himself in a gentleman’s guise for over seven fraudulent years.

When Javert heard the news from Madeleine’s own lips, it was as if the soul was being torn from his body. The echo of God-given pulse rang hollowly within him. To think that Javert had once yearned to discover what was written on the mayor’s hand — when in truth what was underneath those pristine yellow gloves was the clouded palm of that convict, Jean-le-Cric! 

At least Javert had been spared the humiliation of enquiring whether Madeleine reciprocated his desires. There could be no God-given connection between the criminal and he, save for the fate that decreed he should hunt down this fugitive — who had somehow managed to flee Arras in the resulting confusion— to the ends of the earth.

He ran the false mayor to ground in the infirmary of Madeleine’s factory, where the prostitute had been installed. Naturally Madeleine — Valjean — had some invented nonsense about a child in need of rescue. Javert had had enough of the man’s outrageous, incessant, betraying lies.

“Let us have an end to this!” Javert shouted, raising his cudgel; his towering rage made the rafters rattle. “There is no child. There is no Mayor Madeleine. There is only a brigand and a convict named Jean Valjean, and he belongs to the bagne!”

“That is not to whom I belong,” that brigand said, and flung himself at Javert’s cudgel hand.

They grappled over Fantine’s deathbed; once again, that treacherous pulse flared between them, shaking Javert to the core. Thereby rendered fatally vulnerable, the inspector was no match for the strength of Jean-le-Cric.

When he came back to his senses, the room was dark: the convict had already made his escape.

“I will hunt you down,” Javert swore to himself. “Where you go, I will follow. I will not rest till I find you.”

That evening, when he limped back to his solitary lodgings, he removed his own gloves and discovered that his palm was blank, his soul-mark having vanished as completely as his every hope.

  
  


* * *

  
  


According to Madame Thénardier, soul-marks were too good for the likes of abandoned children like Cosette. 

“Your mother had one, but it was her own initial, which was why she was as selfish as she was! Though you can’t blame her for not wanting such a lazy and ugly little miss in her home,” that fearsome woman would tell Cosette. “You’re better off without a soul-mark, and without her, too.”

Cosette would weep at first, but as she grew older, she learned to harden her soul to these pronouncements, so that they would fall onto stony ground and be swept away, in the same way as she swept the floors of the Thénardier inn every morning. 

She had no illusions about what would befall her when she came of age. Unlike Madame’s daughters, who always had new dresses and who wore lace gloves on their hands, her one dress was always threadbare, and when she outgrew her shoes, she had to wear half-broken wooden sabots. Any soul-mark which grew on her palm would remain uncovered, and would soon fade to nothingness, rejecting her as everything else in her life had rejected her.

In this way, this solitary little soul endured many loveless years in Montfermeil, an almost-invisible presence in the kitchen and scullery of the bustling inn, cleaning and scrubbing and sleeping under the stairs of the inn, only to rise and repeat her chores again at dawn. In the midst of the inn’s crowd of disreputable guests, she was achingly alone, seemingly abandoned by God, with only a distant memory of her mother’s care, and the sympathy of Madame’s oldest child. 

Éponine would occasionally bring her an apple after everyone else had gone to bed, and tell her fantasies about heroines who rejected their soul-marks and sent away handsome suitors and who made their own fates. Cosette knew that Éponine would get into trouble if this small generosity was discovered, but she could not bring herself to reject the one person who showed her a scrap of kindness in that hellish place.

Cosette vowed that when she came of age, before her soul-mark could grow, she would try to escape. 

Éponine laughed when she heard this, not unkindly. “I’ll escape with you!” she said. “We’ll run off together. No soul-mates for the likes of us!”

At the time, Cosette wondered, somewhat uncharitably, what Éponine had to escape from. It was only later that she realised that the Thénardiers’ casual cruelty and dubious practices extended to everyone in their vicinity, even their children. 

By the time she understood this, she had herself escaped from Montfermeil. God had not forgotten her in the end; He sent her the kindest, gentlest saviour to take the place of both father and mother. This good, white-haired man took her away from the Thénardiers’ inn and delivered her into the safety of the Convent of the Bernardines of Perpetual Adoration in Petit-Picpus.

In the convent, Cosette discovered the good sisters had also rejected their soul-marks. Like Saint Paul, they considered it far better to remain pious and chaste than to marry; God in His wisdom had agreed, and replaced the soul-marks on their palms with the holy sign of the cross.

Cosette’s beloved father also had no soul-mate, although he lived so closely with the convent’s gardener, Uncle Fauchelevent, that Cosette once believed otherwise. His hands were always covered, in the garden and at prayer; like the sisters, he seemed to have chosen a solitary life of chastity and self-abnegation.

Still, when she came of age and found an initial written on her palm, it was to him that she turned.

“This is in God’s hands, but it is also in yours,” he told her, smiling his faint, wry smile. “He may put the soul which wears this letter in your way, and what you do about it is for you and your soul-mate to decide.” 

Cosette curled her fingers around her palm to hide the mark, and then looked back up at his contemplative face. “Did you once have a soul-mate?” she asked, hesitantly. “Why did you not choose to stay with them?” 

She had never seen the mark on his palm, but she knew that it was there, in the same unspoken way that she had always known he was not the father of her birth. In the event, he did not contradict her, murmuring instead: “There was someone whom I loved, once, and whom I believed I could change. I was mistaken. Some people can’t change, and some bonds aren’t reciprocated. Love isn’t for everyone, my child.” 

Cosette took his words to heart. She knitted gloves to cover her hands, deciding that when her studies at the convent were complete, she would make her own way in the world, without needing to avail herself of any suitor or soul-mate. 

She knew how fortunate she was to have a father who loved her enough to allow her that freedom. After Uncle Fauchelevent passed, they left Petit-Picpus and took up a small residence on the Rue Plumet; her father permitted her to run the household, and to follow him out into the streets of Paris, giving alms to the poor and trying to do as much good as they both could.

It was on one of these excursions that she ran into her past, or rather, it ran headlong into her.

She had accompanied her father to the Boulevard de l'Hôpital, to the little-traversed corner of the Rue des Vignes-Saint-Michel, where he had been told there were many needy families requiring aid. As had become her habit, she and their housekeeper, Toussaint, baked many rolls in readiness for their mission, and packed them carefully in a large wicker basket. Then she donned her old lace gloves and new blue bonnet and ventured out into the busy Parisian streets on her father’s arm. 

The Boulevard de l'Hôpital was even more crowded than it usually was. Cosette recalled the various newspaper headlines announcing the dangers of the ongoing cholera epidemic, and that certain political factions had been calling for an uprising against the oppression of the poor of France. The week before, when she had been walking in the Jardin du Luxembourg, a young man had shoved a pamphlet into her hands before her father had arrived and chased him away; it had been a badly-inked republican leaflet denouncing their current sovereign and advocating armed rebellion.

Cosette had taken note of the young man, who had been rather handsome, if badly-dressed; with some surprise, she thought she saw him crossing the Rue des Vignes-Saint-Michel in front of them, his arms full of what looked to be more revolutionary pamphlets. 

She craned her neck for a better look, which was how she ended up almost colliding with someone else. Her basket tipped over, and the freshly-baked rolls went tumbling into the street. 

Cosette bit back a most unladylike exclamation — she was in her father’s presence, after all — as both she and her hapless victim bent to retrieve her things. 

“I didn’t see you there, forgive me,” the other person was saying, which was much more courteous than swearing, and Cosette looked up into Éponine’s eyes.

The shock was a physical thing, and almost knocked her to the ground. Éponine was wearing dirty boy’s clothing, throat and hands bare like a vagrant’s, but Cosette would have recognised her anywhere in the world.

There was a great ringing in her ears, as if the whole world had been thrown off its bearings and was spinning untethered in the wind.

Her father was helping her to her feet, and then another man was trying to lead them away, saying something about a needy child in the hovel nearby. Cosette allowed herself to be led, though she could not stop staring after Éponine. She could not believe her eyes. Éponine, her childhood not-quite-playmate — who had tried to befriend her, who had tried to protect her, even, in the only way that she had known how — _here_ , of all places, in Paris, so many miles and years from Montfermeil.

Éponine’s dark eyes were filled with a strange alarm; she remained rooted to the spot. Then she threw back her head and shouted: 

“Watch out! The police are here! Disappear, run for it!”

Instantly, Cosette's father stiffened, pulling away from the man who had charge of them. That man tried to grapple with her father, shouting with rage; his hat fell off, and she recognised him as well: it was Monsieur Thénardier.

Other men poured out of the nearby hovel, dressed like brigands and carrying sticks. But at the same time, the police were also arriving — men in their smart navy uniforms, with pistols and canes, and a tall, ferocious man with bristling whiskers, wearing a hat and long great-coat. They seized hold of Thénardier and his fellows, and in no time the gang had been brought to surrender. 

Under the cover of this welcome intervention, Cosette’s father took the opportunity to usher her quietly away. Cosette was unsure of what had just transpired, or why they were fleeing from the scene without saying a word to the officers of the police. She looked back into the street, and her gaze once again found Éponine’s. 

_You said you would escape, and you did,_ that gaze conveyed. _And I said that I would run away with you. I haven’t forgotten that._

In that moment, Cosette’s marked palm prickled under her demure lace gloves, and she knew she had not forgotten, either.

  
  


* * *

  
  


The revolutionaries might not be right about everything, but Éponine believed they were right about this — that the Church’s teachings on soul-marks were nothing but a bourgeois trap to oppress the impoverished classes. According to the rebels, every man, and every woman, too, had the right to educate themselves so that they could read plainly what was written in their own palms and the palms of others, and do away with coverings or courtship so they could choose their mates openly, according to their own heart. 

Éponine’s mother would loudly disagree — she had stiflingly bourgeois ambitions for her daughters, and moreover she had made a business out of oppressing others — but Éponine knew for a fact that her mother’s tattered lace-covered palm was blank, with no soul-mark in sight.

Éponine wanted to believe soul-marks and soul-mates had little meaning. Cosette had, and Cosette was right about so many things; she was the bravest person Éponine had known. Although Éponine couldn’t help resenting it furiously at the time, she knew she ought not blame Cosette for wanting to get as far away from Montfermeil as she could, or for leaving Éponine behind.

The night after Cosette’s escape, Éponine discovered a small initial on her left palm that had not been there the night before. She blinked back her tears and wished very hard that her fate might be different, but try as she might, she could not wash the _E_ away.

Her own initial. Did this mean she was meant to live alone, like Cosette’s selfish mother? Éponine would reject this fate, in the way that the rebels said she could. 

She encountered the rebels after the Thénardiers fell on hard times and moved to Paris to live on the streets and under the bridges. Éponine joined the criminal gang her father had fallen in with, and like a pack of wolves they prowled Paris’ underbelly, stalking the bourgeois who wore bonnets on their heads and lace on their fingers and ice in their hearts. She sought solace in the arms of boys and girls who lived on the street, and did her best to forget the girl who had left her, until her palm grew cloudy and her soul-mark disappeared.

The would-be rebels were students and workers, an egalitarian mix of the bourgeois and working-class. In the aftermath of the cholera epidemic, they removed their gloves and called on all of Paris to rise in protest against the exploitation of the poor. Éponine had started attending their gatherings to keep an eye on her little brother Gavroche, who had taken up their cause, but in no time and against her better judgment, she had come to appreciate the fairness of the rebels’ rhetoric.

That morning she had been distracted by politics and philosophy; she hadn’t been ready to meet Cosette again. 

Cosette was dressed in fine clothes, with lace at her throat and on her hands. Shaded by a bourgeois bonnet, her once-thin face had become beautiful, her dark hair shining with health. For an instant, Éponine was struck silent with envy, and with something even more potent than envy, that she did not then recognise.

That nameless thing seized Éponine in irresistible claws; she found herself turning her back on her father and his criminal friends, and screaming for the police to come to Cosette’s aid. 

In the aftermath of the arrests by the fearsome Inspector Javert and his men, Éponine retreated into the shadows and tried to consider her next move. A part of her could not believe what she had done; another part was gripped with entirely uncharacteristic self-doubt. She knew it was unjust to blame Cosette for having left her behind, or begrudge Cosette’s present abundance of blessings; in fact, Cosette would be within her rights to hold the whole Thenardier family responsible for her miserable childhood. The kindest and most sensible thing would be for Éponine to leave Cosette well enough alone.

Éponine did not adhere to such an eminently sensible course of action. Instead, she enlisted the assistance of the street urchins as well as one of the students, a boy named Marius, and in no time at all she had discovered Cosette was residing in an old house under the name of Fauchelevent in the outskirts of Les Invalides.

That evening, she found herself paying a visit to No. 55 Rue Plumet. As she approached the gate, she saw a by-now-familiar figure standing in the moonlight. Her heart leaped into her mouth; it was almost as if she had summoned Cosette out of thin air.

Cosette didn’t seem particularly surprised to see her, either. She said, with a trace of her old childlike wonder, “You managed to find me!”

Éponine had not decided what she would say when she saw Cosette again. She was acutely aware of the contrast between her threadbare boys’ attire and ungloved hands and Cosette’s fine gown; of how their positions had been reversed since their shared childhood. 

“Forgive me,” she found herself muttering, the same thing she had said the day before. In the moment, she was not certain whether she was apologising for the gang’s earlier robbery attempt, or her resentment of Cosette’s present good fortune, or for her role in the misery of Cosette’s past. 

A shadow passed over Cosette’s perfect brow, as if Cosette, too, was uncertain. Tentatively, Cosette said, “What, for Montfermeil? We were children. What could you have done?”

“I should have done more,” Éponine managed. She was astounded to hear the tremor in her own voice, the exposed cracks in the walls she had constructed for herself.

Cosette took a step back. She stared keenly at Éponine, as if seeing the starved thinness of her wrists and body for the first time. She murmured, as one who had just discovered room for a corresponding regret: “So should I. I should have come to find you. I should have realised that this would happen.”

Éponine’s first instinct was to mislead, as she had done for as long as she had been living in Paris. But again, that hardened young criminal found that she could not dissemble before Cosette’s frank gaze. “It’s true, this isn’t the life I wanted,” she murmured. “It’s no life at all, to be honest.”

“Why did you leave Montfermeil?” But of course Cosette knew — she had been been old enough to tell when a long con was coming to the end of its run.

Éponine described the family's harrowing journey to Paris and subsequent descent into criminal life, which had led her into Cosette’s path in the streets amongst the students the afternoon before. Cosette listened intently. “How awful,” she said at last. “Weren’t you afraid?”

“Father said I would get used to it,” Éponine shrugged. “And now I’m not afraid of anything: not criminals, or the police, or joining the protests in the street.”

Cosette’s eyes widened. “Are you joining the rebellion?” she said, as if the notion sounded romantic.

Éponine shrugged again, aware that her cheeks had grown unusually hot. “Maybe? I don’t know. My brother will, and someone needs to keep him out of trouble? But the rebels are going to get themselves killed, and, well. I’m not ready to die. Especially not now.”

She did not know why she had added that last comment, as if her world had changed now that she had found Cosette again. She could barely hear herself think above the sound of her own heartbeat, like that of a bird which had been caged too long. 

Cosette frowned; in the moonlight, Éponine could see the fluttering of pulse in her delicate throat. “Please don’t go,” she whispered.

Éponine felt her spirits lift, despite herself. Perhaps Cosette did not blame her after all, or perhaps Cosette was now so secure in her good fortune that she would be generous enough to forgive.

It was then that she heard the telltale footsteps in the street beyond. 

“Get inside,” she said, urgently, and without waiting to make sure Cosette heeded her warning, she darted out into the street.

Sure enough, the gang was there: Babet, Brujon, Claquesous, Montparnasse. And her father. Somehow they had managed to escape from Javert’s custody. They must have suspected something, must have followed her, and like an amateur she had led them straight to Cosette. 

Of course these canny con-men did not believe for one moment that there was nothing of value in the old house. There was nothing for it but to raise the alarm and pray Cosette would take heed.

“Beware! Burglars! You’re going to be robbed!”

It was touch and go as to whether the others would take fright at this, or whether they would overpower Éponine and attack the house as they had planned. Thanks be to everything holy, they decided on the former, though not before her father clipped her around the ear.

When Éponine pulled herself to her feet and approached the gate once more, she saw Cosette standing there, looking frightened, but determined to help anyway, regardless of the danger. The sight of this bravery made Éponine’s heart clench with something entirely unfamiliar. 

“The gang has run away, but they’ll be back,” she said, grimly. “Again, forgive me.” It seemed that Éponine and her family would never stop doing Cosette harm.

“What do they want with us?” Cosette began, and then they both heard the unmistakable tread of Cosette’s own father upon the path.

“Cosette, are you well? I heard someone cry out,” M. Fauchelevent said, anxiously, as Éponine melted into the shadows. “Is someone there?”

“It was me,” Cosette said. “There were some men here. I screamed, and then they fled.”

“Some men,” her father repeated. “We may have been discovered after all. Perhaps now is as good a time as any to leave Paris.”

To leave Paris? Éponine wasn’t sure she had heard correctly at first, and then her heart grew cold. If the Fauchelevents were to flee, she might never see Cosette again.

 _Find me,_ she thought fiercely, staring at the shadowy figures at the gate. Her palms started to burn in her pockets, though she had touched nothing. _Don’t leave me behind again._


	2. Chapter 2

_I swear I will find you_ had been the last thing Javert had said to him. 

Over the years, the inspector had come close to making good on that promise, too many times to be a coincidence. Valjean could not deny it: the Almighty in His infinite wisdom kept putting Javert in his path, as a test — or as a temptation. 

Could he be faulted for wishing to have done with this entire soul-mate business? He had sought to obey God’s soul-mark and to reach out to his soul-mate; he had held such hopes that Javert would come to understand clemency and fairness, to say nothing of friendship. And yet their years of mutual trust and accord had in the end all come to naught. In the end, Javert had understood nothing, had turned his back on Fantine’s suffering and had condemned Valjean without even allowing him to explain himself. Surely God could not have meant to yoke him in an unrequited bond to a man so insensible to mercy? 

And yet, even though Javert clearly did not reciprocate that bond, there was the part of Valjean that even now yearned to feel the quickening pulse that signalled Javert’s presence. Try as he might, Valjean could not seem to eradicate that part of his soul.

The Almighty had blessed him in other ways, beyond any measure he could have deserved. He had been given the gift of a daughter, and many years of peace amongst the good sisters of Petit-Picpus, safe in the embrace of the Church.

Still, it seemed the tests and temptations were not at an end. The child of his heart had grown up, and desired to see the world beyond the convent, and he knew he could not keep her with him forever. And, as surely as the world was filled with tests and temptation, so too his activities amongst the poor had drawn him once more into Thénardier’s orbit, and also, inexorably, into that of Inspector Javert.

His worst fears had come to pass. Both Thénardier’s gang and the police would threaten his daughter — there was nothing else for it but to flee. He closed up the house on the Rue Plumet, and moved his household to a dingy apartment in the Rue de l’Homme-Armé, where he prepared once again for flight.

Of course Cosette was upset; she deserved answers which Valjean could not give her. But what was one more secret, when he had even concealed from her his real name?

The Almighty disapproved of secrets. On the day before their departure for England, with all of Paris in an uproar over General Lamarque’s death and an open uprising beginning in the streets, a note for Cosette arrived at the Rue de l’Homme-Armé, conveyed by a young gamin named Gavroche who made it clear he would much rather be elsewhere.

“It’s from the barricades at the Rue de la Chanvrerie, and I’m going back there,” the young man announced, and rushed away before Valjean could stop him.

Valjean opened the note. Its crooked letters formed a profession of love, and of farewell; the writer said it would be a pleasure to one day be reunited with Cosette in Heaven. It was signed with an _É_ , which Valjean knew very well was the same initial marked upon Cosette’s left palm.

Once he had made his way past the temptation of what he dearly wished to do, and the anguish of what he knew he must, Valjean returned to the flat, donned his National Guard uniform, and made his way into the unquiet streets in search of the Chanvrerie. 

Perhaps he could make amends for his moment of weakness, and rescue the soul named for the initial on his child’s palm. That which the Almighty gave, He also stretched out His hand to take away, and Jean Valjean was nothing but His instrument.

The signs of rebellion were everywhere: glass and rubble piled up in the streets along the Rue des Blancs-Manteaux and Rue Maubuée, the patrols and army troops who saw his uniform and let him through. Hurrying along, Valjean could not fail to miss the barricade across the Rue de la Chanvrerie — piled high with furniture and wine-barrels, wooden slats and blocks of rough stone, beset by the municipal guard and soldiers of the line. Valjean retraced his steps and approached the barricade’s auxillary side along the Mondétour alley. 

This side of the barricade was beset by a trio of National Guards, who were climbing its ramparts to attack the lone soul standing there to defend it. With a shock, Valjean recognised the gamin, Gavroche, who had conveyed Cosette’s letter to him not two hours before. He also realised he would not arrive in time to save the boy. 

Gavroche gamely got off a shot at one of the Guardsmen, hitting him in the arm and knocking him off the planks, down to the street below. Another managed to reach the top of the barricade, but just as he was taking aim, there emerged a slender figure who seized hold of the muzzle of the Guardsman’s rifle and directed the bullet away.

The figure cried out in pain — in a woman’s voice — and collapsed. 

The Guardsmen hesitated in their assault of the barricade, giving Valjean time to climb the rest of the way up to them. He hesitated as well: would God forgive him if he attacked them, if he did so to save Gavroche and the girl? 

Then he struck upon a superior course of action.

Jean Valjean leaped over the broken glass that circled the top of the barricade, seized Gavroche by the shoulder, and disarmed the boy of the weapon he was attempting to re-load. He then turned to the Guardsmen standing uncertainly at the apex of the barricade. The Guardsman who had shot the woman had lowered his weapon and was green to the gills. 

Valjean said, authoritatively, “One of our fellows has been injured, you should take him to safety behind the lines. I’ll take care of this boy and stand guard here until you return.”

The Guardsmen looked as young as Cosette; they needed no excuse to hasten back down the barricade to assist their injured comrade. When they were out of sight, Valjean said to the struggling boy, “You know me, Gavroche, you just gave me a letter. I’m Cosette’s father, I’m on your side. Your friend needs help. Let me help you both.”

Gavroche looked sceptical, but when Valjean returned him his weapon, he decided to trust him after all. He followed as Valjean carried the unconscious woman back across the barricade; when Valjean set her down on solid ground she roused from her swoon. 

“Éponine, say you are all right!” The boy made the mistake of trying to embrace her. She let out a heart-rending scream, and they shuddered to see the gaping hole in her left palm.

Valjean asked, “Are you hurt anywhere else, Mademoiselle?”

“The bullet might as well have pierced my heart, for all I care,” groaned the unhappy Éponine, and in her hopeless tones Valjean recognised the despairing soul who had written the letter.

The Lord’s ways were as undeniable as they were mysterious. Valjean bound the poor girl’s wound tightly, and then he carried her over the uneven ground into the nearby wine-shop, amid a throng of thirty or so rebels who had just managed, somehow, to repel the charge across the main barricade.

There, after eight years, in this most unlikely of places, he once more set eyes on Inspector Javert.

“We caught him spying at the barricade,” announced Gavroche proudly; for this crime, the rebels had tied him to a table in the tap-room of the wine-shop. When Valjean entered the tap-room, he lifted his head, and his eyes flared with an astonished recognition which matched Valjean’s.

“You, here? How perfectly simple it is,” he said. 

Gavroche started to mock this opaque pronouncement, but Valjean knew better. Javert was referring to the hand of God that had steered them both to this place. 

Valjean had not observed his own hands in years — the same way as he had not surveyed his face in the mirror since the day in Montreuil when his hair had turned white — but he knew the secret that they hid burned as bright as day.

Again, there was a cold anguish in his breast, as well as an undeniable desire for trust, for the accord that had once run hot within him. And again, he knew what he must do. 

Gavroche refused to leave the barricade, and Éponine, despite her grave injury, refused to leave his side. Reluctantly, Valjean joined the rebels in holding the barricade, firing shots that harmed no one but that did not miss their mark. When the army brought a cannon that pelted the barricade with grape-shot, it was Valjean who retrieved a nearby mattress and held it in a gap to repel the fusillade. 

There came a lull in the fighting after that. When dawn broke, and the rebels finally decided to make an end of the police spy, Valjean approached the rebel leader, Enjolras, and asked to be the one permitted to do it.

“You are the saviour of the barricade. Do what you have to do,” Enjolras said. 

As the others filed out of the room toward their final battle, Jean Valjean once again took charge of his old enemy and old friend. He seized the rope, and despite the intervening years, the quickening once again rose up in his soul.

In silence they climbed the barrier and traversed the Mondétour lane. There they halted. They were alone; the corpses carried away from the barricade formed a terrible pile a few paces distant. The pulse of God’s quickening was all around them.

Under the morning light, Javert looked much the same. There was more grey in his thick hair, but those implacable lines of face and whiskers and powerful body seemed unchanged. It was almost as if time had stood still, and he was still the same diligent man who had done so much good at Valjean’s side — and yet had taken the first opportunity to denounce him.

Their eyes met, and for the first time Valjean saw, beyond the towering rage, a deeper pain that Valjean should have known was there — for he had placed it there himself.

Harshly, Javert said, "Take your revenge."

That implacable police agent, born in Paris’ gutter, whose only God was Authority; in Montreuil, at Madeleine’s side, he had seen the power of mercy at work. He had placed his trust in a merciful authority — and then that authority had turned out to be false, and his trust had been fatally betrayed. Who could fault him for rejecting such a fate, and turning his heart into stone?

Jean Valjean drew from his pocket a knife, and opened it. He ignored Javert’s jibes, ignored the quickening that leaped through his gloves as he touched Javert’s skin, ignored the hammering of his own heart, as he cut the martingale which Javert had about his neck, then the cords on his wrists, then, stooping down, the cord on his feet. Straightening himself up, the God-given pulse loud in his ears, he said, "You are free."

A shudder seemed to seize Javert’s body, a tremor that his iron self-control could not repress. With a start, Valjean realised the inspector had truly expected Valjean to kill him in cold blood — in revenge for Javert’s relentless pursuit, or to sever whatever bond remained between them.

The thought filled him with despair. How had they come to such a pass, that the man he was bound to could believe him capable of such evil? Perhaps it was just as well if he were to perish now, alongside the girl Éponine; so that he might not live to see the ruin he had made of his second chance at life and love.

He said, heavily, "I do not think that I shall escape from this place. But if, by some chance, I do, you will find me living under the name of Fauchelevent, at No. 7, Rue de l'Homme-Armé."

Javert’s face twisted, one corner of his mouth half-opening in a ferocious snarl. He muttered, “Do not think this mercy will throw me off the track, Jean Valjean. I will not be duped further by you.” 

“Forgive me,” Valjean managed. It seemed there was no end to the regrets in his life, and this was one of the bitterest of all. “I did not mean to breach your trust in Montreuil. I will not do so again. I have an obligation to one other here at the barricades, but once that is discharged, I will go with you willingly.”

Javert took a step back, and began, mechanically, to re-order his clothing and fasten up his coat, his gloved fingers stiff on the buttons. Then he resumed his military posture, but made no move to flee. Instead, he ground out, "I’m warning you. If you do not kill me now, I will find you — and, mark me, I will show you no mercy."

“I had thought to convince you that justice without mercy was no justice at all,” murmured Valjean. His heart ached, as did the palm of his left hand. “Now I see how badly I failed you. I mean it: you are free, for I could no more kill you than harm myself. ” 

Javert retreated slowly, his steps strangely reluctant. He paused for a moment at the corner of the Rue des Prêcheurs, grimacing fiercely. He muttered, as if the words were being forced from him at gunpoint, “You said that I was free, but I will never be free of you.”

A moment later he vanished around the corner. 

When Valjean returned to the barricades, the rebels were taking up their positions for their brave, doomed last stand. Gavroche was busy filling cartridges with gunpowder, Éponine at his side, white-faced from loss of blood. 

Valjean went to help them. If these were the last hours he had on this earth, perhaps he could best spend them trying to ensure his child did not lose her own God-given chance at love.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Cosette had endured the preceding week wrestling with her conscience. On the one hand, she owed her father her loyalty, as indeed she owed him everything that was good in her life. On the other, her father had refused to let her know what had triggered this extraordinary flight to a strange country, and Cosette could no longer ignore the mark written on her palm, not after having met Éponine again.

In the end, Cosette made her decision. She was no longer a child in need of anyone’s protection, and though she loved her father, she would make her own fate. She would choose to stay in Paris with Éponine, and together they could try to come to terms with their past as well as their uncertain future.

When her father had left the house that afternoon, Cosette thought this might be her chance to steal away unnoticed with her small suitcase. Éponine had told her that she lived in a tenement on Rue des Vignes-Saint-Marceau on the opposite side of the river. However, when Cosette did venture forth, she discovered the Rue du Chaume filled with soldiers, who told her the streets were unsafe and filled with rebellion. She resolved to make another attempt at night, after the household was asleep.

However, her father did not return that night, nor the long day after. The scheduled time of their departure for England came and went. Cosette remained in the flat, beside herself with worry — both for her father, who would not have willingly abandoned their voyage, and for her friend, who might have gone to join her brother at the rebels’ barricades. She could not eat the midday meal prepared by the good Toussaint, remaining instead on watch by the window that overlooked the street. Occasionally, there would be distant sounds of angry voices, and glass breaking, and gunfire. 

After the second nightfall, when she had started to doze off in her chair, she finally heard the familiar tread on the stairs. 

“Papa!” She leaped to her feet, flung open the door, and was greeted by the sight of her father, covered in muck and grime, holding Éponine’s lifeless body in his arms.

For a moment, she was terrified she would swoon. Then she collected herself sternly, for Éponine’s breast was still rising and falling, and her friend seemed to be clinging to life. 

She had her father lay Éponine in her bed and assembled water and compresses and bandages. Between them, she and Toussaint managed to get Éponine out of her filthy boys’ clothes and into one of Cosette’s old nightdresses. They bathed the wound on Éponine’s forehead, which seemed superficial, and the one on her shoulder, but when they tried to remove the makeshift, blood-soaked dressing around her left hand, the poor girl roused and screamed so piteously that they did not dare tackle that terrible injury.

“The pain means she will live,” Toussaint whispered. Cosette wiped away her tears and hoped fervently that was true.

“Don’t leave me,” she whispered. Éponine stirred; the fingers of her bandaged hand moved restlessly, as if she had heard her in her stupor.

Now that the immediate need was past, Cosette became aware of voices in the dining-room, and someone crying Éponine’s name; she realised that her father had not been alone. Another man now stood in the living room, a tall man in a great-coat with the air of a police officer — with a start, Cosette recognised the man from the attack at Rue des Vignes-Saint-Michel. He was holding a young boy in his arms. Gavroche had been a baby in Montfermeil, but Cosette knew this boy must be Éponine’s little brother.

Toussaint took the lad from the policeman’s arms and helped him into Cosette’s room; thus unburdened, that gentleman turned stiffly to face her father. Glancing in her direction, Cosette’s father forestalled the policeman by saying: “It is as I have promised you, Inspector Javert. Allow me one moment with my daughter. Then you shall do whatever you like with me."

Cosette did not dare breathe. The inspector frowned; his expression was extremely strange, and he spoke as though with great effort.

"It is well. I will wait for you outside."

He cast a last, intent look at Cosette, and then he withdrew, with a stiff and awkward bow, from the apartment.

When they were alone in the dining-room, Cosette’s father began to speak very rapidly. 

“My darling girl, most of this will come as a shock to you. It is my own fault, for I have hidden the secret of your birth from you all of your life, as well as the secret of mine. But now, let there be no more secrets between us, for your very livelihood now depends on it! Know this: my name is not Fauchelevent, but Jean Valjean. Before you were born, I stole a loaf of bread to feed my sister’s starving children, and I spent nineteen years in prison. After I was released, I could not find work; I broke my parole when I moved to the city of Montreuil to start a business and a new life. Your mother Fantine worked in my factory until she was wrongly dismissed. Before she died, I promised her that I would look after you, as indeed I have sought to do ever since.” 

Cosette could not believe her ears. She clung to her father’s grimy hands. When he at last fell silent, she demanded, “Why did you not tell me all this earlier, when I asked you? And why are you telling me now?”

Her father looked bereft; he clasped her hands as if she was still a small child. “Why would any decent girl wish to associate with a fugitive and ex-convict? Dear child, I would have protected you always from this knowledge if I could! But now, the police have found me, and you will need to provide for yourself and protect these poor children that I leave in your care. In the valise in my room are six hundred thousand francs, which you must steward.” 

Cosette wiped her tears away and squared her shoulders. All this was far too much, and yet somehow she knew she must contrive to bear it. She ventured: “This fortune? It was also stolen?”

“No. Every sou of it was honestly gotten. The provenance papers are in the valise: they are the attested profits from my factory in Montreuil.” 

Her father looked so ashamed and guilty that it made Cosette’s heart ache. Hotly, she said, “I don’t care about the money, or about your time in prison. What is going to happen to you?”

“I must go with the inspector. You need to prepare yourself, my dear; I will be gone for a while.”

Cosette shivered at the thought of what this must mean. “Please, I cannot let you surrender yourself! Papa, we can still flee to England,” although as she spoke the words, she knew how impossible that desperate suggestion would be.

Her father let her cling to him for a moment, and then he held her at arms’ length so she could look into his eyes. “My darling, it is the right thing to do. I only fled from the law so I could fulfil my promise to your mother and see you grow up. Now it seems I must pay this final debt to society. If I have raised you at all well, surely you must see this,” and weeping, Cosette knew that he was undoubtedly correct.

She had been prepared to make her own fate with Éponine, had she not? Now was the time to put that determination to the test: a test she dared not fail, not with her friend and Gavroche depending on her. 

For another moment she allowed herself to weep on her father’s breast, crying for her father’s secrets, and his love for her, and for the end of her childhood. He was weeping too. Then she let him retreat to change his clothes and wash — he might have been wading in the sewers, for he was that filthy! — while she made him a cup of coffee. She wasn’t yet ready to face the reality of Éponine in her bed, or the six hundred thousand francs that she now needed to hide.

Her father took such a long time that she was afraid that frightening inspector was going to charge back into the apartment and demand to know whether they were trying to escape; she wondered if she should forestall this by inviting the inspector into the apartment to wait. Her courage deserted her when she approached the door. She noticed that it was slightly ajar, and now she pulled it quietly to.

Finally her father emerged, dressed in the ugly yellow coat she hated, and the dignified peace of a condemned man. He kissed her forehead. “Farewell. Lead a good life. The Almighty bless you and keep you safe.”

She did not weep again, nor say: _I am not ready for you to leave me._ Instead, she handed him his coffee, and then she kissed him goodbye.

But when at last he threw open the door, they discovered the landing was empty, and that the inspector had vanished.

  
  


* * *

  
  


Night had fallen; unseasonally cold, with thick clouds that obscured the stars in the sky. Inspector Javert staggered out of No. 7 and into the Rue des Blancs-Manteaux. The streets, usually populated even at this late hour, were now filled with an oppressive, weighty silence.

Javert’s left palm had begun to prickle. He resolutely ignored this — years ago, he had rejected the lie that had been written on his hand, and he now refused to second-guess that decision, or any other. However, even he could not fail to be aware of the revolution taking place in the depths of his being.

For almost ten years since he had been deceived, he had made his heart and body into stone, had cast out his soul-mark together with those other treacherous desires of self. Instead, he had bent his efforts to rooting out all crime where he could find it, and had used the remnants of his soul-mate’s pulse to track down the false mayor who had wronged an entire city with his fraud. 

He should have known infallibility would not have been so easily achieved. He should have known that, when he least expected it, God would put that criminal in his path once again, and would once again give that malefactor the upper hand. Javert had known himself unimpeachable even then: ready to be sacrificed in the name of the Law — and then Jean Valjean had chosen to subjugate himself to Javert, to surrender himself to Authority, and had set Javert free.

Javert had told himself that it was yet another ruse: one more grand deception, designed to throw him off the track and tear his heart out once again. But when he returned to the streets, fate had led him once more to Jean Valjean, and that man had been true to his word — admitting his deeds to his daughter, and delivering himself unconditionally into Javert’s hands.

It was no trick — Javert had remained behind the door, and heard every word that had passed between father and Fantine’s orphaned child. And now Javert’s soul was unmoored as a boat caught in a storm at night, with no stars to show the way. 

It was inconceivable that an honest servant of the Law could suddenly find himself caught at a crossroads between two crimes — the crime of allowing a fugitive to escape, and the crime of arresting his benefactor. It was even more intolerable that a man who had made himself into granite before God and fate, who had in all his fifty-two years never been touched, could suddenly discover that under breastplate and gauntlets of bronze there was something resembling a soul, and flesh that was vulnerable to desire.

There were only two ways of escaping from his impasse. One was to remain as stone, to return resolutely to Jean Valjean and remove him from the blameless child who depended on him, and restore that fugitive from justice to the galleys forever. The other… 

Javert’s steps, at first without direction, eventually led him towards the station-house at one of the corners of the Place du Châtelet.

Once there, he found himself hesitating. What secrets would he unburden? That he had for some time harboured some as-yet-unvoiced observations for the betterment of the service of the Prefecture of Police in Paris? That there must surely be times where the punishment required by the Law ought to be justly tempered — by remorse, by a man’s good deeds, by the proportionality of the crime to the sentence, by the exigencies of circumstance? This was treason to Authority itself, and yet he could not stop his certainty from being clouded once again, as if God and fate had once more intruded upon his life and refused to allow him the peace he craved.

His spirit was shamefully roused, as was, once again, his traitorous body. His left palm was burning. 

This situation was indescribable. 

He took to his heels once more, and in this way he found the path that led him to the Seine. He reached the Quai des Ormes, skirted the quay, passed the Grève, and halted at some distance from the post of the Place du Châtelet, at the angle of the Pont Notre-Dame. 

There, between the Pont Notre-Dame and the Pont au Change on the one hand, and the Quai de la Mégisserie and the Quai aux Fleurs on the other, was the point of the Seine which formed a fearsome lake, where cold water rolled in vast cataclysms that were visible from the surface.

Javert leaned against the parapet and stared down into the abyss.

The June sky was black. A ceiling of clouds concealed the stars. The deserted streets and quays were shivering and silent; the clanging bell tower of the Notre-Dame and the Palais de Justice seemed as features of distant history. The outlines of the bridges loomed in the darkness, and beyond these murky, familiar vistas was the threat of a strange country, lit by a terrifying new moral sun.

That threat was before him, in the shapes on the horizon and the pulse in the night air: a road that led to an unthinkable place, in which an ex-convict retained his liberty, and worse, stood at the pinnacle of society — a land where kindness was repaid, where justice was founded upon mercy, where the possibility of solitude ended and devotion returned was immeasurable, and where the summit was a white-haired man with a cloud on his palm and infinite grace in his soul. 

Was this the final word of God, that ultimate authority? Could it be endured?

Javert remained motionless, his regard fixed on the water beneath him. All at once, he took off his hat and his gloves, and placed them on the edge of the quay, and mounted the parapet. The straight path of truth was forever behind him; ahead was an impossible country; there was nothing else but to hand in his letter of resignation and consign himself to the river below. 

Steeling himself once more to stone, he readied himself to take that step.

And then, in the stillness of the night, there arose a tremendous noise like the beating of giant wings, and a familiar voice. 

"By God, Javert! For God’s sake, wait!"

Jean Valjean came running across the embankment, footfalls loud in the still night, as if God had aimed him there like an arrow. His cravat had come loose. He was coatless and hatless. In his shirtsleeves he looked powerful enough to wrest civilisation from its underpinnings and hoist it upon his brawny shoulders.

Javert felt his old world shudder upon its foundations. If God and fate had sent this instrument, it was not clear whether those burly arms were going to tear Javert bodily from the parapet, or fling him into the abyss.

Somehow Javert caught his balance. Standing high above the river, the air rocked him in gusts despite the windless night. 

He was gratified to find himself still capable of speech. "Will I never be free of you, Jean Valjean?"

Valjean arrived at the parapet; he leaned against it, taking in deep gulps of breath. Under the white banner of his hair, his face was flushed with high colour, full of vibrant and unmistakable life. 

“Apparently not,” he said, unsteadily. “Tonight, it is my turn to search for you, and I have found you. What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” Javert snapped. “I heard you with Fantine’s girl. That child cannot survive without you, nor those two minors whom you foolishly rescued. And as you well know, I cannot spare you and at the same time continue in my duties. ” Valjean’s eyes widened in the darkness, and Javert pressed on, harshly, “This decision frees the both of us, as well as your daughter.”

Valjean’s face drained of all colour, and then, astonishingly, heedless of his own safety, he pulled himself up onto the ledge beside Javert. 

“You know I cannot allow this,” he said, his voice shaking.

Javert took an involuntary step backwards, fighting to keep his balance. Of course this impossible man would be stubborn enough to try to save him. “Don’t be ridiculous, Valjean. You owe me nothing. I am setting you free!”

This, at least, stopped Valjean; he had to close his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, his face was set in grim lines.

“You told me this at the barricades, and I now see it is true: I will never be free of you.” With a convulsive movement, he tore his gloves off and thrust his left palm under Javert’s nose. “The truth of this can be seen here.”

In Toulon, Javert had seen what had been written in the palm of Jean-le-Cric — a formless mass; a negation of soul-marks and of the Almighty Himself.

But that was not what was written there now. The _J_ disclosed in that broad, calloused palm was as clear as day.

Javert could barely discern his own voice above the clamouring of his own pulse. “When did this occur?”

“After I left Toulon, I stole silver belonging to the Bishop of Digne. He should have denounced me; he showed me God’s love instead. When I turned back to God, He also turned His face to shine upon me. And when I met you again, I knew what it was I was meant to do.”

Javert felt the ground slipping away from under his feet. To think that Jean Valjean, the ex-convict, whom society had unjustly condemned — who had managed to lift a town into prosperity and to raise an orphaned child to adulthood, despite persecution from a merciless man who had seen all the good he had done and condemned him anyway — had also somehow managed to hold on to his faith, and had not let that man out of his heart. 

“How can this be, after all the harm I have done to you? What a monumental joke!”

“It is no joke to me, I can assure you.” Valjean’s strong body was shivering, and not with cold. “I cannot count the times when I asked God to deliver me from this bond which you did not requite. But He clearly had a purpose, and perhaps it was to bring me here tonight, to you.”

He held out his hand to Javert, palm up, the initial seeming to glisten in the darkness. “I know you have no such mark, and have no reason to trust me. But trust God, who sent me. You said you wished to free me? You cannot do so this way. Let me help you instead.”

At first, Javert did not understand. Valjean was speaking of his bond to Javert, of God’s purpose, as if it were a burden he bore alone. When the real truth of the matter…

The sound of wings was almost deafening. Very slowly, he raised his own hands heavenwards. 

His left palm had been blank from the day Madeleine had left Montreuil; it had been blank the day before, when he donned his disguise and headed towards the barricades. But now, it bore a matching soul-mark, a _J_ that perfectly mirrored Valjean’s own.

They stood there staring at the bared soul-marks for a long time, while the night quickened around them and God’s pulse filled their blood and ears and everything in between.

At length, Javert began to laugh. This was entirely intolerable. The abyss yawned at his feet, final and fatal; and seemed almost comforting in the face of the terrifying new road that lay ahead.

“Well, if that doesn’t take the prize! God must be laughing His head off.”

He took a despairing step, and found his way arrested by Valjean’s resolute gaze.

“God isn’t laughing. He wants you to know that your soul still belongs to Him.” He swallowed, and continued with some difficulty: “And it seems mine belongs to you. Perhaps it always did. Please take my hand.”

He stretched out the hand that had seen nineteen years of hard labour, with knotted, powerful fingers that had once held up a caryatid in Toulon’s town hall. It was trembling as badly as Javert’s own. 

“If you go into the river, be assured I will follow you,” he added, as an afterthought.

Javert hesitated for a moment on the precipice, above the abyss. He could not retreat to his former path, and he was no longer ready to resign himself to the abyss. The third option loomed before him, a strange new road with new laws of mercy and devotion, and a new superior whose soul-mark was, after all, written on Javert’s flesh. 

Javert did not know what duties might be required of him, or where this new road might lead, lit as it was by an unfamiliar sun and an entirely new constitution. All he knew was that God’s instrument, Jean Valjean, would walk it with him. 

He made his choice. He took back the letter of resignation, he took up his new duties, and took Valjean’s hand.

Their fingers pressed together; the curtain of clouds parted, and the heavens opened, and the stars were revealed in the sky. Images flared through the both of them like a forest fire —the five decades spent together and apart, family and heartbreak and desires that could only be satisfied by each other — and the night gave up its treasure, and the world was made new.

Eventually, Javert returned to himself, lying on his back on the cold, wet stones of the quay. Beside him was Jean Valjean — bagnard, benefactor, and the one man whose soul was the other half of Javert’s own.

Javert was not at all sure how well he would fare with the new role he had just agreed to undertake, this sudden acquisition of a soul-mate so late in his life. After all, he had been a policeman and guard for forty years, had lived with his cold, correct solitude for longer; he was by no measure accustomed to warmth, or familiar with love. 

But he had always carried out his duties competently, and with Valjean’s fingers pressed against his, Valjean’s memories burning along the edges of his own consciousness, Valjean’s nearness rousing those old desires to the surface of his skin, he suspected it might not be as much of a hardship as he had thought. 

  
  


* * *

  
  


Éponine hated to admit it, but she was not adjusting at all well to her new life. Her left hand itched constantly under its bandages; in much the same way, her spirit chafed within the quiet white walls of the old Fauchelevent house at No. 55, Rue Plumet. 

Despite this, she could feel her body healing, taking strength from Toussaint’s meals and the doctor’s prescriptions. As summer turned to autumn and the days grew shorter, she found herself able to take longer and longer walks in the garden, leaning on Cosette’s arm, and to sit on the grass beside her as she tended her new strawberry plants and to flowers whose names Éponine had never heard before. 

Gavroche, too, flourished under the Fauchelevent roof. His leg would never be the same again, and he grieved for his fallen friends, as did Éponine herself, but, when he recovered, he surprisingly decided to commit himself to the books proffered by Cosette, so that he could one day attend law school like his friend Marius and fight for the downtrodden. 

Éponine knew she would never be able to repay the man who had saved both her and her brother, the benefactor she had come to know as M. Jean. When word had come that Éponine’s mother had passed on and her father had gone to ground, he had gone to seek out Éponine’s other siblings, and brought them to live at Rue Plumet. 

Soon winter arrived, and the garden was covered with snow, Cosette decided to turn to her books in earnest, teaching the little ones, as well as Gavroche, to read. Word spread in Éponine’s old community along the Boulevard de l'Hôpital, and M. Jean was compelled to engage a teacher from Cosette’s old school, and another housekeeper. When the new year came to Paris, No. 55 had become a modest shelter for street children whose parents were in prison, or had abandoned them to their own devices. 

As for Éponine’s father, that winter he was taken into custody by M. Javert, together with the rest of the Patron-Minette, and brought before the assizes to stand trial. It seemed the dour inspector owed a debt of his own to M. Jean; at any rate, he had also taken up residence at Rue Plumet, sharing the shack at the bottom of the garden with M. Jean.

In all the time she had known the inspector, Javert had been a figure of terror, feared by street gangs and vagrants, known for his irreproachable rectitude and impossible courage. It was astonishing to find him living so intimately in the Fauchelevent household, lurking in the study in his shirtsleeves and stalking coatless into the kitchen, his cravat not fully fastened, his head and hands bare. 

Éponine did not immediately realise it, but it slowly dawned on her that M. Jean also did not cover his hands in the house. More, he seemed to think nothing of clasping the large and also ungloved hand of the inspector — when they sat together at the dining table, or walked together in the garden — in the way of bonded soul-mates. 

“Was M. Jean wed to your mother?” she asked Cosette one day, and then listened, transfixed, as Cosette recounted the full story.

“My birth father was named Félix. Which must have been what the _F_ on her palm really meant, unless it stood for her best friend, Favourite.” Cosette coloured as she said this, and so did Éponine, recalling the cruel jibe which the late Madame Thenardier used to make. Cosette continued, “So Papa wasn’t in love with my mother; he just helped her because it was the right thing to do.”

“Your Papa seems to be in love now, though,” Éponine said, slyly, and Cosette blushed again, because it was true. That good man reserved his faint, wry smiles for the grim inspector, and would pause in his work to wait for Javert to return to the house at the end of each day, and in his turn Inspector Javert’s terrifying countenance became almost bearable in M. Jean’s presence. 

As she understood it, the pardon had been Javert’s idea. Unfortunately, it required M. Jean to relinquish himself to police custody, where he had apparently spent many years once before. 

“I will visit you every day until you are freed,” Cosette promised on the day of his incarceration, her eyes red with the tears she refused to shed. 

M. Jean embraced her, saying, “The inspector has said it will not be for very long. But, as you know, I would gladly be imprisoned forever if I were assured you and the orphanage would be taken care of.”

“You will soon be released,” Javert said, impatiently. “If your pardon is not procured as easily as the lawyers have said, I will come for you, and I will not rest until you are free,” and M. Jean had to entreat him to stop shouting, because he was frightening the younger children.

With M. Jean in the Conciergerie, and the inspector working day and night on his case, Cosette took charge of the goings-on at Rue Plumet. She would start her day by visiting her father, with Éponine and Toussaint in tow, and when she returned she supervised the ablutions and prayers of the younger children, and the lessons for the older ones. At dinnertime, she would lead everyone in the grace. She was transfigured by worry and hard work; where another girl would have grown silent and withdrawn, she blossomed, and Éponine could not look anywhere else. Indeed, as the spring days became summer ones, the sight of Cosette in the garden in her simple blue dress, tending to the fruit and flowers, or walking hand in hand with one of the children, often stopped Éponine in her tracks.

As previously noted, in her old life, Éponine was no stranger to physical companionship. But this was different. Éponine could never repay all that Cosette and M. Jean had done for her family, nor could she ever atone for what her own family had done to Cosette. She did not deserve to touch the hem of Cosette’s dress, let alone hope to clasp her white-gloved hand.

And yet she could not help but follow Cosette as she paced the halls and rooms of No. 55, captivated by her solemn profile, by how her hair looked in the light, by the sway of her lithe body that seemed, over the last months, to have become a woman’s. The day’s images of Cosette kept her awake at night in the room she shared with Azelma and three other girls, and she would furtively press the heel of her good hand between her thighs and imagine it was Cosette’s clever fingers which touched her there.

The hole in Éponine’s palm had needed two surgeries to close, but eventually it had started to scab over and then to scar. Éponine kept it covered in gauze although it no longer hurt; this summer, it began to itch again, as if the wound had re-opened due to her newfound desires that she could never hope to satisfy.

M. Jean’s court date was finally scheduled for June, a day after the anniversary of the rebellion. On the day of the anniversary itself, Éponine took the children to a memorial gathering in the Chanvrerie. The wine-shop where so many of their friends had shed their blood had been abandoned, as had most of the surrounding buildings in the Rue Mondétour. Marius and his roommate Courfeyrac were at the gathering, as were others who had survived the barricades and arrests at Saint-Merry. Cosette had also insisted on attending, and when Éponine’s steps faltered, she was there to hold her up.

When they returned to Rue Plumet in the afternoon, they discovered the strawberries had ripened. Cosette darted out to fill her empty baskets, and Éponine followed after. The sight of Cosette plucking the lush fruit from the stems, her lace gloves and her lips stained with red, was almost too much for Éponine to bear.

Cosette did not allow her to escape. “Taste,” she said, mock-sternly, and offered Éponine a strawberry; when Éponine demurred, she held the fruit to Éponine’s lips.

The taste of the berry was sweet beyond measure, but the taste of Cosette’s tart mouth was even sweeter than that.

“I can’t,” Éponine managed, when they finally separated. The hazy afternoon air seemed to be beating all around them, as quickly as her own heart.

Cosette squinted up through her long lashes. “Is this about Montfermeil?” she enquired. “I told you, I don’t care about that any more.” 

“It’s not about Montfermeil, or not just that. It’s… you’re so good, you’re meant to be with someone good, and as for me…” Éponine couldn’t continue; she raised her scarred, gauze-covered hand in lieu of more words.

“I don’t care about that, either. Look at this,” and Cosette tore off her berry-stained gloves, to reveal the _É_ written on her palm.

She prodded Éponine’s shoulder: “Now, your turn — you’ve been wearing that bandage for long enough. Show me.”

Éponine was terrified, as she had never been in her old life, but she could not deny Cosette this. She undid the bandages with shaking hands. When her scarred palm was finally uncovered before their eyes, there was that old _E_ between thumb and forefinger, as clear as day.

Éponine felt as if her heart might burst with disappointment. At her side, Cosette’s eyes filled with tears.

“Don’t cry; it doesn’t have to mean anything! Soul-marks are just a bourgeois invention of the Church… what is it?” For it seemed Cosette wasn’t weeping after all, but laughing.

“My mother called me Cosette, but Papa told me my real name is Euphrasie,” she said, and took Éponine’s scarred palm between both of hers.

Éponine couldn’t catch her breath as their fingers met, and then their lips. The heavens opened, the sunlight poured out of the clear blue sky, and, where once before there had been fortifications and guarded battlements, there was now an open way, and the astonishing rush of another person’s undefended thoughts — Cosette's, impatient and steadfast, and now astoundingly filled with desire to welcome Éponine into all places, into her garden and her life and into her virgin bed.

“So soul-mates are real,” Cosette murmured at last, when they subsided in each other’s arms. She’d never been touched before; Éponine could not wait to show her everything.

It seemed that fate had brought them both to this pass — Éponine had been looking for her love all her life, even though she had never admitted it to herself, as it was now plainly written on her palm. 

“Yes, and I’ve found mine at last,” she said, and Cosette clasped her hand as if she would never let go.

**Author's Note:**

> Title and summary from Song of Solomon 3:1-6:  
>  _On my bed by night, I sought him whom my soul loves;_  
>  _I sought him, but found him not._  
>  _I will rise now and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares;_  
>  _I will seek him whom my soul loves._  
>  _I sought him, but found him not._
> 
> The liberties I take with David/Jonathan and Naomi/Ruth are [rooted in Bible canon](http://saints.queerchurch.info/?page_id=552%E2%80%9C). (OTOH, the liberties I take with the timeline are thanks to the fusion of musical and book canons; plus I figured a soul-bonded Napoleon and Joséphine might have found their way to power earlier than they did in real life ;))
> 
> The [usual colour](https://books.google.es/books?id=dsJx4Ee4YAwC&pg=PA125&lpg=PA125&dq=gants+jaunes+histoire&source=bl&ots=8J6VJ2C3bU&sig=SpkmmAHS3hbs8g9TcH4cmMYvhuQ&hl=es&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjM9vrPvojcAhXFMewKHVDHAtUQ6AEIajAL#v=onepage&q=gants%20jaunes%20histoire&f=false) of the men's "comme il faut" gloves in mid-19C France was [yellow](https://books.google.es/books?id=V47W4Ra74vgC&pg=PT71&lpg=PT71&dq=gants+jaunes+histoire&source=bl&ots=dJg0jxh1kW&sig=vj3zDTtVwLRmzQAjK3oys7N04FI&hl=es&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjM9vrPvojcAhXFMewKHVDHAtUQ6AEIYDAJ#v=onepage&q=gants%20jaunes%20histoire&f=false).


End file.
